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South Africa Study Says Race Is Not Behind Attacks on Farmers

A long-awaited report from South Africa's national police agency concluded today that crime, not racial hatred, was to blame for almost all the attacks on rural farms that have led to the murder of some 1,500 white farmers since 1991.

The thick report, released at a news conference in Cape Town, was the official response to complaints by white farmers and their supporters that South Africa's majority black government had failed to protect them from racial backlash following the end of minority white rule in the early 1990's.

The attacks, often on isolated homesteads in some of South Africa's most isolated countryside, have become a postapartheid symbol of whites' fears of becoming targets of black vengeance.

The attacks increased from about 327 in 1991 to 1,100 in 2001, when about 1 in 7 attacks resulted in a killing, and 1 in 3 victims suffered serious injury.

Farmers and their supporters sharply challenged the report's conclusions.

''You are on your own,'' Paul Swart, a spokesman for the opposition Democratic Alliance party, said in a written statement. ''The government will not protect you. That is the message to farmers and farm workers in the farm attack report released at Parliament.''

The critics argue that the nature of the attacks, which they say frequently involve torture and rape, is proof that something other than robbery is at work.

But the document, more than 500 pages long, used exhaustive statistical analyses of police reports to reach the opposite conclusion.

''There is a very common misconception that in a large proportion of farm attacks nothing is stolen,'' the report stated. ''That is not so: investigations by the committee have shown that various items are stolen in by far the greater majority of cases, and, in those cases where nothing is taken, there is almost always a logical explanation, such as that the attackers had to leave quickly because help arrived.''

For example, the report stated, a breakdown of 2,644 attacks on farms and small homesteads from 1998 to 2001 concluded that the motive in nearly 9 of 10 cases ''was clearly robbery,'' while another 7 percent involved some form of intimidation, and 2 percent appeared racially or politically motivated.

Similarly, the report stated, an analysis of 1,398 victims of farm attacks in 2001 showed that 147 people were murdered, and 12.3 percent of female victims were raped. But in 7 of 10 rapes, the victims were black, not white.

The analysis also concluded, however, that while two-thirds of attack victims were white, white farmers were five times as likely to be the target of a murder as were blacks.

The chairman of the committee that studied the attacks, Charl du Plessis, a former South African attorney general, said much of the analysis tended to suggest that farm attacks were crimes of opportunity driven by poor security and the desperate state of the attackers.

''Perpetrators are an average age of 25 years with some as young as 14,'' he said at a news conference in Cape Town. ''Typically they are black, usually uneducated, almost always unemployed and almost always from a dysfunctional family.''

Durkje Gilfillan, a lawyer with the Legal Resources Center, a nonprofit agency, said the report underscored what some analysts have long maintained: that attacks on farmers are little different from attacks on other South Africans.